1 May 2021BrazilUnidentified death-record matching system
A Brazilian federal judge in the 4th federal region ordered the social security institute (INSS) to pay a retiree R$3,917.67 in moral damages after finding that his pension had been stopped by a failure of the institute's artificial intelligence system, according to a Federal Regional Court of the 4th Region (TRF4) news item relayed by the Brazilian Institute of Social Security Law on 30 September 2022. The judge explained that the benefit was suspended automatically on 1 May 2021 by an artificial intelligence command that captured data from the death-records system (Sisobi), and that the data used, the person's name and mother's name, were not enough to prevent the wrongful cessation. The retiree said the pension was his only source of income; he asked for reactivation and sent a handwritten declaration, and although he showed in person that he was alive, the benefit was restored only in January 2022. The judge wrote that the AI 'proved inefficient or unintelligent' in this case and that the INSS made him wait 226 days. Arrears were also ordered paid. Whether the INSS appealed is not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 02/11/2026
Jan 2021United StatesHireVue (reported)
A man who applied for a supply chain job with CVS in Massachusetts around January 2021 says CVS put him through a HireVue video interview with questions about integrity, and alleges that HireVue sent the recording to a platform called Affectiva, which analysed his facial expressions, eye contact, voice intonation and inflection with artificial intelligence and fed a score to CVS. He sued CVS in a proposed class action under the Massachusetts Lie Detector Statute, alleging the interview was a lie detector test and that the online application lacked the notice of rights the law requires. He says he did not know the interview was a lie detector test and would not have taken part had he known. In February 2024 a federal judge in Massachusetts denied CVS's motion to dismiss the notice claim, finding a concrete informational injury; CVS had not challenged the other claims at that stage. A law firm commentary says he was not hired. In July 2024 he reached an individual settlement with CVS, whose terms were not reported. The allegations about the AI analysis were not tested in court.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 02/11/2026
Feb 2021United StatesGoogle CSAM image classifier
In February 2021 a San Francisco father took photos of his toddler son's medical condition after a nurse asked for photos before a video consultation; the doctor used them to diagnose the problem and prescribe antibiotics. The New York Times reported in August 2022 that when the photos were backed up from his Android phone to Google's servers, Google's artificial-intelligence tool for recognising never-before-seen child abuse images flagged them. Two days after the photos were taken his Google account was disabled for 'harmful content', which cost him more than a decade of email, contacts and photos and, through Google Fi, his phone number. Google reported him to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the San Francisco police obtained search warrants for his account; the investigator concluded that no crime had occurred. Google refused to reinstate the account after two appeals, the second with the police report, and later notified him that it was being permanently deleted. The Times reported a second father in Houston whose photos of his toddler, taken at a paediatrician's request, were also flagged; his Gmail account was disabled in the middle of buying a house, Houston police questioned and cleared him, and he did not get the account back. Google said it stood by its decisions and that its reviewers had found a further video in the San Francisco father's account that it considered problematic.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 02/11/2026
Mar 2021United StatesID.me Face Match
ID.me, an identity-verification company used by at least 21 US states to check people claiming unemployment benefits, asks claimants to pass a facial recognition step that compares their face with a photo of the same person, such as a driving licence. In June 2021 Motherboard (VICE) reported that a gig economy worker in Las Vegas was suddenly cut off from his unemployment benefits in late March after ID.me failed to identify him. He said that when he held his phone in the instructed position the system rejected him three times without giving a reason and then locked him out. He said he tried ID.me's chat support many times and the state of Nevada sent him back to ID.me; after several weeks he posted a public criticism on Twitter, and the company contacted him and, after several more days, verified his identity. He said he went three weeks without his benefit and could not pay bills. ID.me's chief executive told Motherboard that its Face Match algorithms operate at about 99.9% efficacy, that failures are a problem with how people use the system rather than the technology, and that the company was unaware of eligible people unable to verify their identity. Motherboard said other claimants in several states described similar lockouts; those accounts are not counted here.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 30/10/2026
2021United StatesNetradyne cameras
In September 2021 Motherboard reported accounts from six Amazon delivery drivers in five US states and the owner of an Amazon delivery company, who said the AI-powered Netradyne cameras Amazon had installed in its delivery vans from early 2021 regularly registered driving 'events' that were beyond their control or were not unsafe driving: being cut off by another car, glancing at a side mirror, stopping past a stop sign to see around a bush, or a stop sign flagged on a dirt road with no sign. Each event fed a weekly safe-driving score that, according to the drivers and an internal Amazon document Motherboard obtained, helped decide drivers' bonuses and prizes and delivery companies' bonuses. A driver in Los Angeles said the camera incorrectly penalised him and that requests to see the photos flagged as events went unanswered; a former driver in Texas said events that did not happen affected his score, which decided prizes from his delivery company. Amazon said the technology gives drivers real-time safety alerts, that accidents and violations had fallen since it was installed, and that its staff manually review appealed events so that erroneous ones do not affect drivers. Netradyne did not respond to Motherboard.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 27/10/2026
2021IndiaSamagra Vedika
An Al Jazeera investigation published on 24 January 2024, produced with The Reporters' Collective and the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network, reports that Samagra Vedika, a system the Telangana government uses to consolidate residents' data and check welfare eligibility, wrongly tagged poor families in Hyderabad as owning cars, and that officials relied on those tags to deny them food security cards (subsidised rice). Al Jazeera says the system uses machine learning and entity resolution to match people across databases, and that since 2016 officials have been mandated to check whether the system approved an applicant before deciding. In one case it reports that the system mistook a widow's late husband, a rickshaw puller, for a car owner with a similar name; her renewal application was rejected in 2021 for possessing a four-wheeler. After she traced the vehicle's real owner, officials agreed there had been an algorithmic error but said her family income exceeded the limit, which Al Jazeera says was not the case; she had been without the subsidised rations for more than seven years. A second family, whose husband cannot drive, was rejected in 2021 for possessing a four-wheeler; in November 2023 the High Court of Telangana said the petitioner is eligible whenever new cards are issued. The government says the technology is highly precise and that wrong vehicle or house tags occur in under five per cent of cases and have mostly been corrected.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 24/10/2026
16 Apr 2021United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers (reported)
At about 5:30 a.m. on 16 April 2021, according to a lawsuit reported by The Almanac, an automated license-plate reader in Atherton, California, misread the dirt-obscured plate of a driver's car, reading its letter H as M, and matched it to a reported stolen vehicle. Atherton police followed the car for several minutes without visually verifying the plate, then made a high-risk felony stop, ordering him at gunpoint to throw his keys out of the window, get out and lie on his stomach to be handcuffed. He sued three officers in 2022 for unreasonable seizure and excessive force; the officers denied the allegations and the injuries he claimed, and the case was settled on 16 March 2023 for $45,000. Business Insider, citing police records, reported in March 2026 that the misread came from a Flock camera and that officers noted the Flock cameras had misread the plate; an Atherton police commander said the plate was obstructed by dirt and that the town denies wrongdoing.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 04/10/2026
23 Jun 2021United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
According to police and bank records reviewed by the Washington Post, in December 2019 a woman made fraudulent withdrawals at a SunTrust branch in Potomac, Maryland; branches in two other Maryland counties were also defrauded. A bank investigator posted the surveillance photos on CrimeDex, an online network of police and corporate investigators; an unknown respondent ran the image through facial-recognition software and returned Kimberlee Williams's name and photo, and the investigator told Montgomery County police that facial-recognition software had identified her. Police in Montgomery, Prince George's and Anne Arundel counties charged her in 2020 on the investigator's identification and their own visual comparison of photos (two departments also cited her old Oklahoma check-fraud convictions), without reported checks of her whereabouts; Montgomery County police did not disclose the facial-recognition search in the charging application, according to police records reviewed by the Washington Post and the ACLU. On 23 June 2021 she was arrested at the gate of Fort Sill near Lawton, Oklahoma, while accompanying her daughter on a DoorDash delivery, spent about three weeks in an Oklahoma jail, was flown to Maryland, and faced 16 charges including 12 felonies. The counties dismissed the charges one after another, in October and December 2021, after about six months in jail. Her daughter says she was depressed afterwards; the ACLU says the ordeal harmed her mental and physical health. On 14 April 2026 the ACLU and ACLU of Maryland sent complaint letters to the three departments seeking an apology and reforms.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026
14 Aug 2021 to 14 Mar 2024United StatesSt. Louis mugshot recognition (SMRT)
Christopher Gatlin was arrested on 14 August 2021 for an assault at the St. Charles Rock Road MetroLink station after a joint St. Louis County and city team uploaded a grainy, blurry surveillance photograph from a bus into the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology System, a facial-recognition tool that searches stored mug shots (more than 500,000 uploaded, the suit says per the Post-Dispatch; more than 250,000 per Biometric Update via Hoodline), and built the investigation around the resulting match together with a witness identification; he was charged with first-degree assault and held roughly 17 months (the Post-Dispatch says almost two years), a county judge suppressed the witness identification as unconstitutionally suggestive, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on 14 March 2024 (Post-Dispatch; Hoodline citing Biometric Update; Bloomberg Law). Gatlin sued St. Louis County, the City of St. Louis and named officers in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on 13 January 2025; on 15 October 2025 the court denied the city's motion to dismiss and granted a detective's motion only as to one count; on 13 August 2026 the court allowed a second amended complaint adding Amazon Web Services, which the complaint says supplied the Rekognition program the system used; the county, city and officers answered on 27 August 2026, AWS's response was extended to 21 September 2026 and on 17 September it moved for a further extension to 28 September (no ruling on the docket when read), and a jury trial is set for 1 November 2027 (CourtListener docket). Amazon told the Post-Dispatch that its terms of service prohibit the use of its facial recognition technology in criminal investigations and that it would fully investigate any information that emerges in the litigation. The ACLU lists Gatlin among fourteen people known to have been wrongfully arrested in the US because police relied on erroneous facial-recognition results.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 26/09/2026